Rakow says he was working on a neighbor's deck last Friday when the mishap occurred:

I was leaning against a board with the gun. I had the gun at an angle, chest level, and it jumped and I still had my hand on the trigger. It impaled the nail in my chest."

While the pain didn’t set in at first, Rakow quickly called his wife and was rushed to the hospital where doctors discovered the nail was two millimeters of a coronary artery. Had it there, Rakow would’ve died instantly. The surgeon who worked on him said, "This nail went through the front and the back of his heart, barely missing critical structures.”

Somehow, Rakow was able to leave the hospital on Monday and return home to celebrate his daughter's 20th birthday.